


Five Moments of Nile's (Immortal) Life

by ladyflowdi



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Historical Inaccuracy, Humor, Immortal Husbands, Immortality, Light Angst, M/M, Music, Pets, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:14:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29515161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyflowdi/pseuds/ladyflowdi
Summary: Moments from the first years of Nile's immortal life, with her immortal family.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 14
Kudos: 123





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A series very loosely tied together, and 100% a vehicle for love, family, and fluff. I'll add to the tags as I post. Rated M for language and some adult themes later on.

Nile’s a child of Chicago, of winters so bitter she’d learned how to blink icicles out of her eyelashes without rubbing the cold, scratchy wool of her mittens over her face. She’d gone dancing at three in the morning, spilling out of clubs wearing tiny, sparkling dresses and sky-high heels, in negative fourteen-degree weather. She’d slept outside when she ran away from home at fourteen, choking under the oppressive weight of her mama’s expectations and her daddy’s medals hanging on the living room wall. 

She thought she knew winter. The bite of it, the way it settled into your bones. The way blanket-thick clouds full of snow waited for the temperatures to dip after the weak sun finally slipped back down under the horizon, to dump ice and sleet four feet thick. 

Turns out, all Nile knew could fit in a thimble, just like everything else in this forsaken life. 

Scotland ain’t fucking Outlander, for instance. Sure, there were incredible, soaring vistas, the craggy coast and the sea, dark and violent and choppy and _breathtaking_ , bracketed by jutting scraps of land with a million dark, thick trees. What they didn’t show you on Outlander was how _cold_ it was. It was the kind of cold that stole the breath from your lungs before you could exhale, and even with a parka, and long-johns, and two sweaters and three pairs of mittens, it ate at you in minutes. 

“I long ago decided that it was the most beautiful, yet most miserable, place on this earth,” Joe agrees, teeth chattering where he’s huddled against her, because he’s got sense. “And that’s saying something, I lived through medieval Europe.”

Nicky, who’s so wrapped up all she can see of him is his roman nose and those big, seafoam eyes, doesn’t so much as blink from where he’s sprawled out on the concrete roof of a One O One, his grip secure on his sniper rifle where it’s aimed a mile away. There are bored guards huddled together against the far side of the compound out of the wind, waiting for their boss to get back, in the exact same position they were in the last time Nile checked with the night-vision binoculars Copley had so helpfully supplied. Joe had said it would be good Spotter experience, and he wasn’t wrong, even if all she’d gotten to spot were mercenaries-for-hire picking their noses. At this point, she’s half-convinced the boss had been invited to stay at the minister’s country gala for the night.

“We were serfs for a short time,” Nicky says without looking away from his scope. “Joe has never quite gotten over it.”

It’s always wild to hear them speak like this, so completely beyond her scope of understanding that she never knows whether to laugh, ask more questions, or cry. _"Serfs?”_

“Working a salted, godforsaken plot of rock for the lady of the manor,” Joe says, thrusting his chin out at Andy across from them, “in subzero temperatures, wearing what amounted to burlap sacks.” 

“You were terrible serfs,” Andy agrees across from them, muffled from under her scarf. “The sacks were cute, though. Showed off your legs.”

“It was terribly romantic,” Nicky says, and Nile can just make out the crinkles of his eyes that announce how very much he’s enjoying trolling Joe. “We lived in a tiny hut--”

“Hovel,” Joe mutters.

“With a little donkey who pulled our hoe for us.”

“Before you ask, yes, the hovel smelled of donkey, for that bastard beast lived with us,” Joe says, and Nile can’t help it, she bursts into peals of muffled laughter, hand over her mouth. “We cuddled up to it for warmth, ergo, we _also_ smelled of donkey.”

“And worse,” Nicky agrees. “Donkeys are not known for being housebroken.”

“No,” Nile says, hiccupping with glee, and Andy’s shoulders are shaking. “No, you’re lying.”

“Me, a merchant of the Maghreb, a land of culture, beauty and _cleanliness_. A man who spoke six languages, who wore only the best silk robes and satin slippers, who had dined with caliphs and princes alike,” Joe intones with all the appropriate gravitas, his dark eyes bright with mirth and crinkled with crows feet. “There I was! Lying on a dirt floor with a stinking donkey on one side, a stinking Nicolo on the other, nothing but the hunger in our bellies and our burlap sacks for comfort. And that was our life. For _ten years._ ”

“It was nine months at most,” Nicky says, and Nile has to wipe her eyes, she’s laughing so hard. “You get used to the smell of donkey, it becomes a part of you.”

“They smelled for weeks after we finally burned the lord’s manor down and freed everyone,” Andy says, rolling her eyes. “I thought Joe was going to peel off his own skin when Quynh told him he smelled like an unswept barn.”

“It didn’t much bother me,” Nicky says, and winks at her. “What was it you called me, _tesoro_? In those first years after we stopped killing each other?”

“An unwashed peasant. To be fair, you’d only bathed twice in your life when we first met, so it wasn’t unwarranted.”

“Purposefully submerging one’s body in water was a form of medical treatment in Europe, and not typically done outside of the apothecary,” Nicky tells her, and though he hasn’t looked away from his scope she can see him wince. “Medieval medicine was based on the idea of four humors, and keeping them in balance. Bathing was seen as a way to bring humors back into balance, to rid the body of excess phlegm through the skin. You bathed when you were ill, and only then.”

“Oh my God.”

“We cleaned ourselves with water and basin and a rag, but soap was a luxury most could not afford, much less men of humble beginnings such as me,” Nicky says. “Joe is right. I was literally an unwashed peasant.”

“Meanwhile, I was perfumed and oiled and sleek, like a panther,” Joe says, and Andy chortles across from them so suddenly that it brings a reflexive grin to Nile’s face. Joe sighs, forlorn. “I was lovely back then.”

“I know how this devolves, and I’m not going to listen to you both gush about how gorgeous the other is for the next three hours,” Andy says. “Nicky? Anything?”

“Two of the guards are now smoking, and the third seems to have fallen asleep standing up.”

“I’m calling it,” she says, and that’s that.

In the car on the way back to the safehouse, Nicky says from the backseat, “You’ve grown into your loveliness and out of the wildness of our youth, _tesoro_. Perhaps less like a panther, and more like a housecat,” and Joe’s mock growl of rage has Nile in stitches all over again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’ve been here for two months already, and it isn’t that she isn’t enjoying Spain’s perpetual summer after Scotland, the heat on her skin and the delicious food, she doesn’t know what comes next. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything I learned about Arabic I learned from Google. Many apologies to any native speakers if I (read: Google Translate) mistranslated it, but I just could not take out the joke because Nicky _tried_ and that is adorable. The history though I came by the old fashioned way, but I got my degree many years ago and I had to brush up on Turkish history. Let me know if I got anything wrong dear friends, and I hope you enjoy this next installment!

Nile doesn’t pick up on the rhythm of their immortal lives for a while, but she gives herself some slack, because it’s been thirteen months and this is their first true downtime. 

The house in Segovia is beautiful. Nile’s never been to Spain - had never even left Chicago before she joined the military - and she’ll never admit this to any of the others, but she can’t quite wrap her brain around how _different_ everything looks and feels from what she’s used to. How green Scotland had been, but also how vast, how wild, almost like the land itself had only stoically tolerated them. How warm Morocco had been, how colorful and bright, like someone’s fun-loving auntie who always came prepared with food nobody could eat because she added too much heat to it. And now Segovia, which looks a little like she thought Italy should look, this suffused, soft golden glow about everything. The ancient buildings in their yellow facades and ancient, European style because they were _actually_ ancient and European. The roman aqueduct waterways crisscrossing the city, built with granite blocks and no mortar, which had somehow survived nineteen-hundred years. The city is breathtaking, and beautiful, and she doesn’t know how to explain how it makes her feel, the way it makes her feel wistful for something she can’t name or place.

They’ve been here for two months already, and it isn’t that she isn’t enjoying Spain’s perpetual summer after Scotland, the heat on her skin and the delicious food, she doesn’t know what comes _next_. The thought’s been keeping her up. Usually, Nicky seems to know when she can’t sleep and he’ll join her for two-in-the-morning tea, or he’ll make her pancakes, and he’ll sit and listen. Sometimes she can’t speak, so they sit in silence that is nevertheless warm, and real. 

Almost like clockwork, the bedroom door down the hall opens. But it isn’t Nicky who comes out of the bedroom he and Joe share, it’s Joe himself. 

Joe was a big fan of sleep, Nile knew, so to see him shuffling down the hall, his hair a mess and pillow creases on his face around dark, bruised eyes, was strange enough that she asked, “You alright?”

Joe makes a noise that’s half grunt, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot Nile made a while ago. He’s very much the antithesis of Nile and Nicky -- he likes coffee sweet and creamy, not black as midnight and so bitter it burns your sinuses. She watches him doctor it, half-conscious and listing to one side as he glares blearily into the fridge for the milk. 

He reminds her all the time of her daddy’s brother, Arnie. He’d been a few years younger than Daddy, a military man too, and he’d always come home when he was on leave. She can remember being a little girl and sitting at the breakfast table with Nay, watching Uncle Arnie stumble around the kitchen looking for sugar with pillow creases on his face and his sleep pants falling on one side. 

From the back, Joe looks like Arnie did. The curls are a different texture, the sleep pants blue instead of the gray checks Arnie preferred, but still, she can’t help but feel that little kick in her chest at the resemblance. At the love that has blossomed here too. 

Joe doesn’t ask what she’s doing up, which she’s grateful for. Silences have always made Nile nervous, because silence had always been where all of Mama’s anger and disappointment had lived, but she’s learned she doesn’t have to fill the silences here, with these people. 

Joe looks so rumpled, and so miserable, as he finally drops into the chair beside hers with his precious cargo, cup steaming slightly from the nuke in the microwave. With eyes still half-closed, he mutters, “Shhh.”

“I didn’t say a word,” she replies, and can’t help but grin when he scowls. “What’re you shushing me about anyway?

“I’ve heard it all before. Just because I’m not a morning person doesn’t mean I am not, at times, up at the crack of dawn. I just don’t like it.”

He smells like bed and sleep, like unbrushed teeth and night sweat and just a little bit funky, the way men always were when they woke up. Used to drive Mama crazy, when Nay hit puberty and would roll out of bed and try to go to school without washing the man-funk off of him. 

“I’ve been with you all for a year, and not once in that time have you ever been awake before nine in the morning,” Nile replies, chin in her hand. “Did Nicky kick you out?”

“My heart has never kicked me out of bed,” Joe says, like a liar. He opens an eye and sighs in her direction. “It was the paella.”

She thought she’d heard someone in the bathroom around midnight. “You okay?”

“Oh, the paella is long gone. Along with everything I’ve eaten in the past month.”

It’s so startling. And so human. “I didn’t know we could still suffer from stomach stuff.”

“Nicky and I have spent many nights holding each other’s hair back.”

Something warm and solid and real slots into place. “Do we still get sick? Like, coughing, mucus, sneezing sick?”

“Not like you think,” Joe says, but something about her tone has him studying her. “Our fevers break within minutes, not hours or days. Sniffles last even less time than that.”

She can still get the sniffles. She’d heal from it super-fast, but she’d still get sick. “But not stomach stuff.”

“Your body can’t heal you when you’ve put food in it that you shouldn’t have,” Joe says, and rubs his midsection with a pained sigh. “You’ve got to go through it the old-fashioned way. It’s just been a while since I had to.”

“Since like, what, 1905?”

“2016,” Nicky mutters from the doorway, a little pale himself, his eyes shadowed with interrupted sleep. “We won’t speak of it because Yusuf is still a bit green, but it too included shellfish, as well as the words ‘Joe, you shouldn’t eat that’.”

“You did say that. He did,” Joe tells Nile, sighing as Nicky rubs the back of his neck in passing before heading to the coffee pot himself. “I don’t listen.”

“Nine hundred and fifty one years old,” Nicky says. “In all those years, my love, shellfish have never been kind to you.”

Nile ignores that first part as best she can, because hearing all those years, and attaching that kind of life to the rumpled, pillow-marked face of the sweet man sitting across from her, feels like science fiction. Feels unreal. And these days, feeling unreal makes her feel untethered, makes her want to start screaming, and if she gives into that she doesn’t think she’ll ever stop. 

“What’s the best meal you two ever shared?” she asks instead, and her voice must be a little unsteady because Joe reaches out and laces his fingers through hers, holding her hand with such gentleness that the tears spring up in her eyes anyway. 

“Casida, with almonds,” Joe says immediately, and Nile gets to watch the flush roll over Nicky’s cheeks as he sits down next to them, pinking his ears. A jolt of love she never expected to feel for these people warms at the center of her, knotting in her throat. 

“It was awful,” Nicky says with a groan.

“This was in the days before he was mine and I was his, when our peace was a fragile thing and the tenderness of our courtship was just beginning,” Joe says, eyes suddenly bright. “It’s a porridge made with barley and a hint of honey. It was undercooked and yet also so thick we could have used it as mortar. And still, it is the best thing I have ever eaten, because my Nicolo had asked me what I missed most about my home, and when I told him about the porridge my mother made me every morning of my childhood, he set out to learn the recipe, to remind me of more innocent days.”

Nearly a thousand years ago Nicky had made Joe inedible porridge, and he was talking about it as if it was a cute story from when they were dating, the kind of story her friends would share about their boyfriends when they almost burned the house down trying to make them breakfast. It could have happened yesterday, except Joe is telling her about the tent they lived in, and how the color of Nicky’s eyes made small children cry because they’d never seen green eyes on a person, and how Nicky’s broken Arabic mortified the shopkeepers because he kept asking for _mushkila falafel._

“It translates to ‘problem falafel’,” Joe says through the biggest shit-eating grin. “He wanted _mushakkal falafel_ , which means ‘mixed’, but the consonants kept getting garbled up by his accent.”

“They thought I wanted to poison him,” Nicky tells Nile, and she can’t help but smile too. “Granted, in those days he was insufferable, so I had reason.”

“They were both an acquired taste,” a voice says from the doorway, and Nile looks over her shoulder at Andy, in sweatpants and a green t-shirt that was communal property, seeing as how Nile had seen Nicky wearing it to the grocery store, and peeking out from under Joe’s blue sweater. Nile decides that she likes Andy like this, sleep-rumpled and gummy, barefoot as she crosses to the fridge and opens it. The yellow light illuminates her face, the fragile length of her toes. “They got over the first shock of immortality pretty quickly -”

“It was eighty-six years,” Nicky says.

“- and decided to be mercenaries for hire, for people crossing the Sahand to Tabriz and the Silk Road. A priest and a merchant, who carried swords they had no business carrying, fueled by nothing but enthusiasm and the need to do the right thing.” Andy passes behind Joe’s chair and gives his bedhead a scritch, and he tips his head back to grin at her. She sets a bowl of the flan Nicky had made last night on the table, and turns away to dig in the cutlery drawer while Nicky peels the plastic wrap open. “Reminded me that there was more to life than being angry at all the death people could inflict on each other.”

Nile can just picture it. Joe’s enthusiasm, Nicky’s calm. New, like Nile is now. “Where did you meet?”

Andy rattles around in the drawer for another minute before coming back to the table with four spoons. “Was it the Sultanate of Rum?”

“Kaykaus,” Nicky confirms, taking two spoons from her. “When he won the Port of Sinop.”

“Alexios was the Grand Komnenos of Trebizond, and one of two brothers who claimed lineage to Andronikos, the last Byzantine Emperor of Constantinople,” Andy says, digging her spoon into the flan while handing Nile her own spoon. “Andronikos got himself killed, and Alexios and David spent the rest of their lives trying to legitimize and centralize their power. They had two real claims - the Port of Sinop and the city of Trebizond, in northeastern Turkey.”

“Not unlike Los Angeles today. It was a port of call between the sea and the Road,” Joe says, around a mouthful of flan. “It’s a long story, but Alexios was out on a hunting trip when mercenaries found him. They tied him up and threw him over the back of a horse, and brought him before Kaykaus, the Sultanate of Rum and his enemy. Alexios traded Sinop and Trebizond for his life.”

“The histories say that it was a peaceful exchange of power, but history is, how do they say. Written by the victors,” Nicky says with a twist of his mouth. “I’ve edited several Wikipedia pages along those lines.”

“You what.”

Andy sighs loudly, but Joe is smiling. “My heart doesn’t like for the young people to learn false history.”

Nile turns her stare to Nicky. “Don’t you have to provide citations to edit those pages?”

“Yes, and I do. Dr. Giuseppe di Menchi, my Wikipedia alter ego, has multiple advanced degrees from universities across Europe and has written scholarship for many prestigious historical journals.”

Joe is biting his lower lip so he won’t laugh, and Andy is rolling her eyes. “Kid, it isn’t worth the argument.”

“Yeah but he can’t just put ‘this is wrong cause I say so’,” Nile says, and she’ll never admit how hilarious the idea is, of Nicky being so angry about revisionist history that he’d created an account to troll Wikipedia pages and fix glaring errors that no one is going to care about except doctoral students. 

“Alexios didn’t just give the Sultan his land,” Nicky says, brushing Wikipedia aside with a sniff. “Now granted, Kaykaus tried to be merciful, tried to negotiate a surrender. Alexios’s life, in return for the Port. But Alexios, in typical royal, grandiose fashion, bombasted that he was untouchable, that he was king of all, blah blah blah.”

“My Nico isn’t a fan of royal posturing,” Joe says around his spoon.

“What Alexios didn’t know was that David, over a period of some months, had been drawing together loyalists to overtake Alexios’s claim and become the sole Byzantine heir left with rights to Constantinople. David did not _want_ Alexios back. Unfortunately for David, Alexios bore an uncanny resemblance to Emperor Andronikosm and of the two men, Alexios was beloved by the people. When word spread that Kaykaus had their beloved Alexios, the people of Trebizond raised such an outcry that David could not contain it.”

“Enter Yusuf and Nicolo, stage left,” Andy said drily.

“We’d been hired by the bourgeois houses of Trebizond to save Alexios and bring him to safety,” Joe says. “In those days we were just barely a hundred years into our immortality, and just as Andy described it, we were, ah,” and he winces, squinching one eye shut. “How would you say it, Nicky?”

“Andy had the right of it,” Nicky replies, a note of sulking in his voice.

“They weren’t _bad_ fighters, they just weren’t good ones,” Andy says, licking her spoon before going in for another scoop of flan. 

Nicky and Joe, who operated as a single fighting unit, who Nile had personally witnessed take down over forty guards when they were escaping Merrick without breaking a sweat. “Seriously?”

“We were enthusiastic.”

“We’d yet to know each other,” Joe says, and smiles softly when red creeps up Nicky’s cheekbones. “We were companions, walking the road together, but this was during the early days of our courtship. It took us both time to find our way to the other. We didn’t know how we fit together yet.”

“They argued constantly,” Andy says, rolling her eyes. 

“I wouldn’t call it arguing, boss. More like gentle disagreements.”

“The first time Quynh and I saw them in person, they were naked as the day they’d been born and screaming at each other like fishwives.”

It isn’t the first time Andy has mentioned Quynh in passing, and a hurt like Nile doesn’t think she’ll ever know is still there, but mortality had brought more to Andy than just the certainty that her years had an end-date. 

She brushes her foot against Andy’s, and they share a look. It’s nice having another woman to do that with, the way she and Mama could have an entire conversation without a word, the way Dizzy used to arch her brow and Nile could read a thousand words in it. 

“That’s embarrassing,” Nile says, just a touch gleeful, just to make Andy smile.

Joe groans and Nicky buries his face in his hands. “Why must you tell the new ones this story,” Nicky says, muffled, his ears red.

“Keeps you humble,” Andy says around her spoon, winking at Nile. “They’d been robbed.”

“In the middle of the night,” Joe argues. “And, _and_ , let the record show, we’d been killed _then_ robbed, so it wasn’t our fault.”

“Remind me again who was supposed to be keeping watch,” Andy says like the instigator she is, and Nile grins as Joe and Nicky launch right back into the argument like they’re picking up where they left off nine hundred years ago.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe helps her bathe the little puppy, and he and Nicky are _hayati_ this and _tesoro_ that, but there’s an undercurrent of tension now, and she gets why Andy asked if they were fighting.

Five months later, they’re in Munich on a job when Nicky comes back from shopping one morning with a grocery bag full of fresh vegetables, a bottle of wine, and a labrador puppy. 

The puppy is _small_ , maybe five or six weeks old, and so filthy that it’s blonde coat is ashy gray. Nile doesn’t even know what to say, gaping from the kitchen table where she’s been trying and failing to complete college registration paperwork with the alias Copley set up for her, but it’s Andy who says from the sink, “I thought you said you weren’t arguing.”

“We’re not,” Nicky says, putting the groceries on the counter. The puppy is shivering, muddy, and Nile jumps up because there’s a _dog in the house_ and it is so cute she can’t look directly at it, lest it blind her with its adorableness.

“Is this our dog? Do we have a dog now?” Nile asks, reverting to approximately twelve years old as she rubs it’s tiny, silky head. 

“No,” Nicky says, but he gives the dog to Nile, and the weight of it trembling against her chest makes her want to cry. It smells like piss and fear, poor baby, and Nicky reaches around her to take a bottle of puppy shampoo out of the grocery bag. “Merely fostering for a few days, before we take her to her new home.”

“Where?” Nile says, murmured into the baby’s little head. It whimpers and licks her chin, shivering terribly. “Where are we taking her?”

But Nicky doesn’t answer, because Joe is standing in the doorway. 

He looks from Nicky, to the puppy, then back again, the smile sliding off his face. That bright and cheerful expression that Nile has come to recognize as his default fades, and the weight of a thousand years of grief pulls his face into terrible, haggard lines. For the first time Nile recognizes how truly old he is. All the evils of the world that he has witnessed are made manifest in the heaviness of his hooded eyes, the pull of his mouth. 

And then just as suddenly as that grief had flickered into existence it’s gone, and Joe looks past Nicky, smiling at her. “Never would have pegged you for a dog person Nile, and by that I mean I completely pegged you for a dog person.” 

“It’s a _puppy_. A tiny little baby dog puppy,” she defends, because it won’t stop licking her chin, but also because she recognizes that he hadn’t wanted her to see his pain. 

Joe helps her bathe the little beauty, and he and Nicky are _hayati_ this and _tesoro_ that, but there’s an undercurrent now. It isn’t tension, not really, but now she gets why Andy asked if they were fighting. It doesn’t _feel_ like fighting, not when Joe lays his head on Nicky’s lap and Nicky strokes softly through his curls as he reads aloud from _All the Light We Cannot See_ just as he has for the past week, because television has only been around for seventy years and for the previous four hundred this was what was done at night, with family. Not when Joe links his fingers tenderly through Nicky’s when they say their goodnights, Joe holding their intertwined hands against his chest. Still, Nile has come to recognize, even if she doesn’t quite understand, what immortality looks like when anger and hurt are filtered through it, what pain looks like on the faces of people who so deeply love each other.

She isn’t exactly surprised when Nicky announces two days later that he’ll be taking the little dog to her new home, and Joe asks, “How long will you be gone?”

“A day. Two at most,” Nicky replies, and he doesn’t ask if Joe will come, and Joe doesn’t volunteer, and it’s so strange that Nile says, “I’d like to. Come, that is,” because it feels _weird_ having any of them out there alone, and _weird_ because Nile hadn’t thought Joe the type to let Nicky out of his sight if he could help it, even if they were not-fighting. She doesn’t miss the way his shoulders relax, though, when Nicky has turned away. 

She’s never really done the cross-country thing, much less in a lemon-yellow Citroën GS helmed by an immortal, with a puppy in a laundry basket strapped into the back seat, but what is her life now except a series of improbable moments. 

The trip is gorgeous because Germany is gorgeous, all rolling green hills and quaint villages kissing the blue, cloudless sky. Nile doesn’t even realize they’ve crossed the border between Germany and Switzerland until Nicky tells her to change the language on her Translate app to Swiss German, which he explains includes all kinds of Alemannic dialects. He’s quiet after that, his big eyes heavy and far-away, and Nile isn’t stupid, she’d suspected where they were going right around the moment Joe’s face had gone pale and terrible.

She lets him keep his peace as they merge onto the A3 motorway, the Rhine on their right. The mountains thrust up in the distance, snow-peaked and dazzling against the enormous expanse of water. It’s just another in a long series of beautiful things Nile has gotten to see since she came into this life. Nicky drives like he’s taken this particular trip a thousand times, and it’s possible he has, over the course of his long life. This part of Germany is old country, ancient forests and architecture and castles, juxtaposed against shiny new highways and a McDonalds at every other rest stop. 

Nicky hasn’t looked at a map once, but nevertheless seems to know exactly where he’s going. He wields the Citroën through traffic like it’s a sports car and not the forty-five-year-old heap of scrap metal it clearly is, banging color notwithstanding. Soon enough, signs start popping up to exit towards Basel, and Nile says, “Isn’t this where Erasmus is buried?” and Nicky makes a low sound in his throat.

Nile peers over at him. “You didn’t know Erasmus.”

“I was the accoucheur on the night of his birth,” Nicky says, slowing into a curve. The Citroën whimpers below them. “A midwife,” he clarifies, off her blank look. 

“You brought Erasmus into the world.”

“Technically, his laboring mama did,” Nicky says absently, and they’re in the city proper now, gleaming white buildings and the sparkling Rhine in the background. It’s a beautiful city, and even the new architecture compliments the old, so the ancient buildings, the abbey, don’t look out of place. Women are pushing strollers, and elderly couples are walking hand-in-hand, and there are storefronts on every corner, and Nile is happy to see five mom-and-pop shops for every Starbucks. 

Nicky parallel parks next to a row of apartments in beautiful brown and gray stone. It’s an older neighborhood lined with big trees and ancient-looking powerlines, though they only add to the charm. With a low sigh, he turns the car off, and the puppy whimpers in the back seat. The car click-clicks, groaning beneath them. 

On the sidewalk, a woman and her mother pass, each holding the hands of a toddler who is shrieking and swinging between them. An old church steeple peeks up over the line of apartments, ancient cross thrust up against the sunshine. 

Nicky stares out the window for a time, tracing his thumb over the head of the car key over and over. Nile lets him, because he owes her an explanation. 

“I was a bad man, once,” he finally says, quietly. “I was indoctrinated in the church, unmoved by the pain of those I saw as inferior, and righteous in my piety. When the Pope called for his holy warriors, I set down my vestments and took up a sword to free the Holy City from people I viewed as trespassers. I killed indiscriminately.”

It seems impossible. Nicky is the most gentle and kind man Nile thinks she’s ever known, who she has personally witnessed capturing bees in drinking glasses to be set free outside. Who, for the four months they were in Scotland, bought groceries for the elderly, impoverished widow up the road, and set up delivery service for her after they left. 

“I thought Yusuf my own personal demon, sent to earth to keep me from the eternal reward I’d earned with my blood and sacrifice,” he says, staring at the church steeple across the way. “I killed him over and over, and still he rose. He killed me in turn, and still Heaven was locked to me. I knew then that I was unworthy of eternal reward, that what I had done in God's name had been demanded by sinners who claimed to know His will, and I lost what fragile hold I had on my sanity. I roamed the Judaean desert for a very long time, trying to atone, to beg God forgiveness for the horrors I had perpetrated in His name.”

She can picture it, and doesn’t want to. 

“How did you find Joe again?” 

Nicky laughs, and it sounds nothing like humor. “He followed me. For months he walked in my footsteps, to protect the innocent from this crazed creature who could not die just as he could not die. When finally he made himself known to me I was but skin and bones and could no longer hurt anyone. And my Yusuf lifted me as if I weighed nothing, and put me on his camel, and took me to Aqaba, just south to where I had wandered for over a year, on the Red Sea.” 

He looks at her now, and reaches out to put his big hand over hers, clenched over her knees. He squeezes her hand, gently, until she turns it palm up and they can lace their fingers together. “He could have left me to traverse the desert until the sand buried me, until the earth swallowed me. But instead, he looked upon that pitiful creature and decided that I would be saved, that in my saving I would spend what years I was to be on this earth saving others. He nursed me, and taught me how to speak his language, and reforged me from the ashes I had been reduced to. Yusuf took me in hand and guided me to my salvation. And when finally I had the courage to ask him _why_ , he told me that all deserved mercy. Even me.”

She knows, then, why they’re here. Knows what they’re going to find, when they walk into that apartment building. She looks up at it so she doesn’t have to look at him, so he won’t see that he’s brought her to tears. He must know anyway, because he always knows, and she swallows until she can speak. “Why the puppy?”

“A hope, to bring him back from the chasm his actions have created, and from the hole his guilt has buried him in,” Nicky says quietly. “New life is innocent in its wish for love, as it is boundless in its expression of love. It will reach him, where we have tried and failed.”

“You think so?”

“Only hope,” Nicky says. He turns to look at her, then, and Nile has never quite seen that look on his face. “Don’t think less of him. I don’t know what we are to find. But don’t think less of him.”

“I won’t,” Nile promises him.

.

She keeps that promise, though it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done. She keeps that promise, even when what they find in that apartment rewrites everything Nile ever knew about human suffering. She keeps that promise, because Booker has served in more wars than she can fathom, because he stormed Normandy and huddled in trenches and witnessed atrocities she’s only ever read about in history books. 

She keeps her promise, because no one deserves this, no matter what they’ve done.

When they leave, it’s Nicky who closes the door behind them, Booker pale and gaunt and staring at the puppy in his lap on that mattress on the floor, but it’s Nile who doesn’t make it to the car before tears are pouring down her face. 

They make the trip again fourteen months later. This time, when Nicky guides the lemon-yellow Citroën GS away from the apartment building, Booker is in the backseat with the puppy who isn’t a puppy any longer. She’s huge and healthy and slobbering all over all of them, her coat gleaming. Booker is still gaunt, still pale, but there’s life in his dark blue eyes now, and when she reaches back around the center console to take his hand, he’s already stretching forward over the dog, to meet her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It comes as a surprise to her, how much these immortals love music.

It comes as a surprise to her, how much these immortals love music.

From the very moment she came into this life, there’s music playing. Every safehouse she’s been in has heaps of CDs, records, cassettes, arranged on shelves like priceless art. They have an assortment of devices, from iPods to ancient MP3 players to drives, and Joe proudly tells her that Booker had acquired a cloud to house all of their music on, so these days they stream a lot. 

It is, in a word, _eclectic_.

Nicky loves instrumental music from Spain, Francisco Tárrega and Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Granados, and can talk at length about it if given half the chance. “The compositions, Nile, the way the melody matches the heartbeat. Breathtaking,” he sighs, as Tárrega plays the Nokia ringtone way before it was Nokia’s ringtone. Joe loves instrumental music too, plays the oud like he’s spent a thousand years practicing on it, which he _has_ , but golden oldies is where his heart’s at. They listen to _Please Mr Postman_ by the Marvelettes and _Just My Imagination_ by the Temptations and _Mamma Said_ by the Shirelles, and she can imagine them in 1961, the four of them in bright, bold colors and big hair.

Booker is more like her, though, which is funny because for the second-youngest immortal he’s still two hundred and fifty years old. Still, he likes what’s new, fresh tracks and beats that don’t quite sound like old eras, but like what tomorrow can bring. Likewise, she half expects Andy to love grunge metal or something, but it turns out that she’s into 90s folk rock, lots of Hootie and the Blowfish and Bruce Springsteen and Tracie Chapman. When Nile asks her about it, Andy just says, “Reminds me of long ago,” and won’t speak anymore on it. 

She loves introducing them to new music. She shares her entire library on the cloud with them, and laughs when they spend _weeks_ exploring it, listening to Frank Ocean and SonReal and Santana. It’s almost sweet, how excited they are to hear something new.

She should have seen this coming, honestly. 

It’s late. She can’t sleep, because she can never sleep, because sleep has become synonymous with letting her guard down and that’s not a thing she can do, not when she’s barely keeping the terror of what her life has become back with two hands. Not when she dreams of salt and brine and suffocating. 

It’s late, and she just wants some water, and she should have turned around and walked away but her feet are frozen to the ground. 

It’s Nicky, and Joe, in the kitchen. The dim light over the stove is on, casting the rest of the room in shadow, except for where the two of them are wrapped around each other. The way they dance together is so intimate that Nile feels the flush come up her face, the way she did when she was a kid and intruded on a quiet moment between Mama and Daddy. 

She’s never seen Joe and Nicky kiss like the lovers they are; never seen them do more than give one another the gentle, intimate touches of long love, the brush of a shoulder here, the straightening of a collar there. They showed their love in the coffee they made for the other, or when Joe got the shower going so Nicky could have it first. They showed it when they made a plate of food and gave the other the best piece of whatever they were eating, or when they got clothes out of the drier and made sure to leave the softest and toastiest socks for the other to put on. The long, practiced, comfortable love like Nile had only ever seen so long ago, the one summer she spent with her grandma and grandpa in their house on Lake Erie. Kind love, filled to brimming with tenderness.

This… this is an extension of that. Calum Scott is crooning _you’re the reason my heart keeps beating_ from the tinny speakers of Joe’s beat-up iPhone, and Nile has seen them moving together in violence, and maybe this is a little bit like that still. For all that Nicky carries himself like the medieval knight he once was he’s still the shorter of them, and he fits perfectly in the crook of Joe’s neck, tucked away and safe. 

It’s the expression on Joe’s face that brings tears, hot and stinging, to Nile’s throat. 

She’s never seen anything like it on a man’s face. Her entire life she’s been fighting against men who made her feel small, who made her feel _less_ . Men she’d been forced to be respectful to, even though she felt no respect. Male egos she’d had to stroke, to get ahead in life. _You’ve gotta play the game, sis_ , Dizzy had once told her. _Only way you’re gonna get what you want in this life_.

Nile doesn’t see an ego she has to stroke. There’s no posturing, no male pride. There’s just Joe, and Nicky, and this enormous love they’ve shared for a thousand years, all of that love written on Joe’s soft and naked face. They’re steadfast, and strong, and nurturing and tender, and Nile must make a noise because Nicky lifts his head up and they both turn to her.

“Oh, _bambina_ ,” Nicky murmurs, and holds out a hand to her, and Nile shakes her head but it’s Joe who smiles, bright with love, his cheek on Nicky’s temple. “Come on.”

“It’s this stupid song,” Nile sobs, as Calum Scott croons _I’d climb every mountain, and swim every ocean, just to be with you,_ but she lets Nicky tow her in. And then Joe wraps his big arms around them both and she’s squished and Joe is kissing each braid he did himself on the crown of her head, and the song changes to _The Game of Love_ by Santana and Nicky says, “I _love_ this song,” and Joe is laughing as Nicky swings her into his arms and Nile doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Joe’s air-guitaring the bridge when Andy stomps in, scowling, and yells, “How did I not get invited to the midnight dance party,” and Joe bellows back, “Because you need sleep _grandma_ ,” and Andy tackles him just like he intended because suddenly he’s dancing with her in an old-timey waltz and she’s spitting mad, trying to kick him and _succeeding_ , and he can’t stop laughing. Nile looks over Nicky’s shoulder to Booker, his smile a small and crooked thing on his handsome face where he’s leaning against the doorway, and Chloe is barking and squirming through their legs, and for the first time since she stepped into this immortal life Nile feels something slow and warm and solid slip into place, filling her heart full.

  
  



End file.
